1) The way to announce the server closing - I was told, that there
should have been no earlier warning for the registered account members -
by just generalising some ~friendica problems, as if all pods would
have been closed down, is the first suspicious sign, that the admin was
unwilling or not capable to do his job.

2) It is true that there are - depending on the server you have your
account - on ~F a lot of out times and dysfunctionalities, which caused
also myself that I use ~F less often as I would have liked to do so,
e.g. in regard of the hub feature composed by federation & RSS-Feed
(if RSS works, alas!) and its excellently configurable reposting unit.

3) You may find a very lively German speaking community with a
ongoing cooperative spirit, where all kind of questions, especially for
those who are running their own pod are discussed and may be brought in;
this is still going on, also, when Red comes more and more in the focus
of some early users, who are subsequently highly skilled IT
specialists, for sure.

July172012

IMO it's more than that - the whole dynamics of information flow is broken, countless accounts aren't any more providing - as we have been used to since the early times of soup.io - automatic RSS import, since beginning July it's just not even manually possible to activate the feeds.

Soup.io remains by its concept a great on-line tool, but there are meanwhile too many unanswered questions about its future - please start to react on your communities demands. We should start to discuss in which direction soup.io is worth to be continued and improved in its features. - oAnth

---------------------------------------------

"...We are currently exploring ways of handing over control of Soup.io to
the community of its users over the next few months, so that development
can be restarted. More on that as soon as we know more...
" (Christopher Clay)

February212012

This week the Berkman Center and the Research Center
for Information Law, St. Gallen released the latest study on the state
of interoperability: “Breaking Down Digital Barriers.” This joint report follows the Roadmap to Open ICT Ecosystems
released in 2005, as it navigates the nuanced territory of consumer,
corporate, and governmental interests in the benefits and roadblocks to
interoperable ICT systems.

The report and accompanying case studies on DRM-protected music, Digital Identity, and Mashups are available for download on the project website. The presentation and discussion of the report and its findings, took place in Washington, DC. Runtime: 01:04:20

January012012

I excerpted some interesting pieces from this article by David Weinberger. He wrote:

"The rise of the digital is changing just about everything about curation, mainly for the better but not entirely.

Collections themselves used to be physical assemblages of works. Now, not only are the works unassembled, the collection consists of metadata about the works. The metadata includes not only where the object exists (usually a clickable address), but also information designed to help the user evaluate whether it's worth the click.

You know you have to include the standard reference works, but for most of the works there's no right answer and probably no uniform agreement among the curators themselves. Now every curator can have her own digital collection even if other curators disagree.

Digital curation often only brings an item to our attention and reduces the number of clicks to get to it. The items outside the collection are still available on the Web and may show up at the top of a search results page or on someone else's curated list. The cost is in discovering the item; once discovered, items generally are only one click away.

Finally, curation protects us from works that are a waste of time, works that would mislead us or works that are objectionable. In a digital world, we have lots of other ways of accomplishing these goals: We use recommendation systems of various sorts, and a wide variety of evaluative tools have emerged to help us decide what is helpful and what is misleading.

Curation is thus changing at its core. It's curating metadata, not primary materials. Multiple curations can exist in the same space. We are losing the sense that there is a right curation for almost anything, and are also losing our sense of mastery of topics. And collections often are not as safe as they once were. Because of its strengths, curation will be with us forever. Indeed, as the welter of content continues to increase, we'll have more of it than ever.

In some areas—medical information, legal text—it will retain its old virtue of providing a reliable, authoritative source. In most areas, though, it has already been transformed, simultaneously transforming our idea of what constitutes a topic, what constitutes expertise, what constitutes authority and what constitutes a collection."

November182011

“[...]

Facebook doesn’t track everybody the same way. It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members.

The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser. If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types of cookies. If you don’t set up an account, it only inserts one of the two types.

These cookies record every time you visit another website that uses a Facebook Like button or other Facebook plugin — which work together with the cookies to note the time, date and website being visited. Unique characteristics that identify your computer are also recorded.

Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity. It deletes entries older than 90 days.

If you are logged into a Facebook account, your name, email address, friends and all of the other data in your Facebook profile is also recorded.

October032011

The website Occupy Together offers a wealth of information on the social movements catalyzing in many cities in the United States and in other countries around the world against corporate greed and corruption.

for those who are looking for a decentralized social network platform which in my opinion has realistic potentials in the coming years to develop as a central base for the international protest movement

-------------------------------------------------

oAnth:

this entry is part of the OccupyWallStreet compilation 2011-09/10, here.

New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and
horizontally organized process through which we are building the
capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective
forces within and against the constant crises of our times

You can also search by country
to discover that Google, the owner of You Tube, has complied with the
majority of requests from governments, particularly in the United
States and the UK, not only to remove You Tube videos, but also
specific web search terms and thousands of “data requests,” meaning
demands for information that would reveal the true identity of a You
Tube user. Google claims that the information sent to governments is
“needed for legitimate criminal investigations,” but whether these
“data requests” have been backed up by warrants is not divulged by the
company.

“Between July 1 and Dec. 31 (2009), Google received 3,580 requests
for user data from U.S. government agencies, slightly less than the
3,663 originating from Brazil,” reports PC World.
“The United Kingdom and India sent more than 1,000 requests each, and
smaller numbers originated from various other countries.”

[...]

-------------------------------------------------

oAnth:

this entry is part of the OccupyWallStreet compilation 2011-09/10, here.

September252011

In New York City's Financial District, a peaceful protest has been organized by the group Occupy Wall Street (#occupywallstreet on Twitter), and supported by the Canadian organization AdBusters and the hacker group Anonymous. Inspired by the demonstrations in cities throughout Arab and European countries, these youth are showing their dissatisfaction with the way in which Wall Street has, according to them, controlled the policies of the United States economy, making it into a “corporatocracy” and leaving millions unemployed. This group has occupied Zuccotti Park since September 17, and they expect that more people will join in the upcoming months.

Poster from the movement.

Musicians, medical staff, an improvised library and a technology team armed with computers and other devices can all be found in the park. The demonstrators also have created banners with pieces of cardboard in which they express their feelings against capitalism, as well as their opposition to the Troy Davis execution. The demonstrators have joined under the motto: “We are the 99% who will not tolerate the greed and corruption of the remaining 1%.”

Sofía Gallisá photo. Published with permission.

A poster showing the online media resources for finding information. Sofía Gallisá photo. Published with permission.

Sofía Gallisá photo. Published with permission.

Sofía Gallisá photo. Published with permission.

Although the protests have been carrying on without much disturbances, there have been arrests: according to recent reports, close to 80 arrests took place on Saturday, September 24, mainly for disorderly conduct on behalf of “individuals who blocked pedestrian and vehicular traffic,” in addition to resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. Nonetheless, this did not thwart the demonstrators' march from continuing to other parts of the city such as Union Square in the center of Manhattan. While traditional media has not provided much coverage of the protest, information has exploded all over digital social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr).

National figures like professor and philosopher Cornel West (@CornelWest) demonstrated his support via Twitter: